After Chicago, life moved with the speed of a mad quickstep at a drunken waltz. Days and weeks disappeared in a meaningless and hazy blur. It could have been that looming fear and uncertainty that something grandiose might happen or not happen at the end of High School. Or it could have been the massive amounts of legal drugs that I was injesting to kill off the three varieties of infection that were breeding in my respiratory system and in other areas of my body.

In any event, lots of crazy stuff happened that someone other than me could probably relate in a better manner. I went to Prom and actually double dated with Inteligente, meaning that I drove us and our dates. Prior to Prom actually starting, Inteligente lost his tickets, gave me bad driving directions, and lost his tickets again. Fortunately, Inteligente had me along to draw attention away from his inane mistakes. All I had to do was act like myself. With such an unspoken challenge, I managed to bore all thirty-two members of our group at dinner by telling a series of self-inflated egomaniacal stories. As a follow up, I danced even more badly than most people, and at the after-party, wrestled Bismarck to a draw on a trampoline. I also managed to effectively embarrass and annoy my date. Impressively, I was able to accomplish all of this without touching a single drop of liquor of any sort. Anyhow, some other stuff happened too around that time, but it couldn’t have been that important because I don’t really remember it that well.

In any case, one of my first days of lucidity after weeks of drug loopiness came in advanced physics. It was your classic blow off class to everyone except Bismarck. We had all had physics before, none of us were going to be physicists, and the teacher more or less left us to our own devices, because he was a really intelligent but mild-mannered fellow. The best part about the period was the socializing, occasionally interrupted by Bismarck complaining that we were disrupting his studies. It was a great experience because the whole cast of the characters was there with even more periphery players.

One day, we weren’t doing our 007 equations, as usual. We weren’t doing them, because the professor had already reiterated that in the problems, Bond could never die, so if our answer allowed Bond to die, we had done it incorrectly. While a good motivating tool, and quite humorous, the absolute law of an undying Bond was a detriment to productivity. If we knew Bond would always live, there was no need to really calculate his exact momentum out of his Aston-Martin past three goats, through a farmhouse and off a cliff. We also weren’t making ice cream out of dry ice either, so there was really no reason not to socialize. We were therefore sitting around playing the boring game of mafia, all except the Doctor, who was eying the biology pond, which for some reason, was placed next to the physics wing.